Prepare to Meet Your God

'Come to Bethel, and transgress; to Gilgal, and
multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your
tithes every three days; offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that
which is leavened, and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them;
for so you love to do, O people of Israel!' says the Lord God. 'I
gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread
in all your places, yet you did not return to me,' says the Lord.
'And I also withheld the rain from you when there were yet three
months to the harvest; I would send no rain upon another city; one
field on which it did not rain withered; so two or three cities
wandered to one city to drink water, and were not satisfied; yet
you did not return to me,' says the Lord. 'I smote you with blight
and mildew; I laid waste your gardens and your vineyards; your fig
trees and your olive trees the locust devoured; yet you did not
return to me,' says the Lord. 'I sent among you a pestilence after
the manner of Egypt; I slew your young men with the sword; I
carried away your horses; and I made the stench of your camp go up
into your nostrils; yet you did not return to me,' says the Lord.
'I overthrew some of you, as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah,
and you were as a brand plucked out of the burning; yet you did not
return to me,' says the Lord. 'Therefore thus I will do to you, O
Israel; because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, O
Israel!' For lo, he who forms the mountains, and creates the wind,
and declares to man what is his thought; who makes the morning
darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth—the Lord, the
God of hosts, is his name!

The aim of my message this morning is to persuade you and
inspire you to prepare for worship—both in this age week by week
as we meet together, and in the age to come when we will stand
before God either prepared or unprepared to meet him. Last week I
wanted us to feel the biblical call to worship God, and see some
reasons to join heaven in worshiping God in advance of that last
great celebration of his triumph over Babylon. Today I want you to
feel the biblical call to prepare for worship.

Amos' Ministry to the Northern Kingdom

Let's begin with a biblical foundation from the prophet Amos.
Amos was not a well-to-do man of the upper class. He was a simple
shepherd. He lived in Tekoa 12 miles southeast of Jerusalem about
800 years before Christ. He describes God's call on his life in
Amos 7:15, "The Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord
said to me, 'Go, prophesy to my people Israel.'"

So Amos' main ministry was directed not to the southern kingdom
of Judah where he grew up, but to the northern kingdom of
Israel.

These were days of outward prosperity in Israel, but from a
spiritual standpoint these were terrible times. Amos was sent right
to the center of corruption, namely, the cult city of Bethel.

The Heart of Idolatry in Bethel

Back when Jeroboam led the break away of the ten northern tribes
from the two southern ones, he made Bethel his alternative worship
center to Jerusalem. 1 Kings 12:32–33 describe why this became a
great evil in Israel.

Jeroboam appointed a feast on the fifteenth day of the eighth
month like the feast that was in Judah, and he offered sacrifices
upon the altar; so he did in Bethel, sacrificing to the calves that
he had made. And he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places
that he had made. He went up to the altar which he had made in
Bethel on the fifteenth day in the eighth month, in the month which
he had devised of his own heart; and he ordained a feast for the
people of Israel, and went up to the altar to burn incense.

So Jeroboam had built high places of worship in Bethel and put
up idols in the form of calves and set up his own priesthood and
new holy days. So what had begun centuries earlier as a holy place,
where Abraham and Jacob had met God, was now the center of idolatry
in Israel. And God called Amos to go cry against the corruption of
Israel and against Bethel and the kind of worship that was going on
there.

The Israelites' False Religion

Chapter 4 tells us one of his messages. Verse 4 is pure irony.
He echoes the call that goes out to Israel to come and worship at
Bethel, and says,

Come to Bethel and transgress, to Gilgal, and multiply
transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes
every three days; offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which
is leavened, and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them; for so
you love to do, O people of Israel!

So it is obvious that the Israelites were very religious. They
love to do these things, Amos says. They sacrifice daily, tithe
every three days, give thank-offerings, advertise special free-will
offerings. And in all this they multiply transgressions. It is all
sin. They have some of the old form that the Word of God laid down
in Moses' writings, but it is now a sham. They may still use the
name of God, but their idols betray them.

And not only their idols. Their lifestyle does too. In verse 1
Amos says, "Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are in the
mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who
say to their husbands, 'Bring, that we may drink!'" So we get a
little glimpse of the wealth that people love and the indifference
and hardness to the poor. "You oppress the poor and crush the
needy."

What Israel Needs to Do

So Israel comes to meet God at Bethel with lives that are dirty
and with outward forms of religion that have lost all real
connection with truth. One way to describe what Israel needs to do
is to stop on their way to Bethel and prepare to meet God. They
need to prepare themselves by renouncing all their love for wealth
and their lack of love for the poor. They need to prepare
themselves by setting their hearts only on what is true. Who is the
true God? What is the truth about idols of gold? Are the priests of
Bethel true priests of the living God? (Priests like Amaziah who
accused Amos of treason because of his prophecy of judgment, cf.
7:10–15.) Prepare to meet God at Bethel by forsaking sin, and
seeking truth.

God Blocks Israel Five Times

In verses 6–11 Amos is done with irony. He reminds the people
that God has shouted the truth of his reality to them in five
striking ways that they might return. But they would not. In verse
6 he says there had been famine—"lack of bread in all your
places, yet you did not return to me, says the Lord." In verses 7–8
he says there had been drought—God withheld the rain . . .
"yet you did not return to me, says the Lord." In verse 9 he says
God smote them with blight and mildew and locust . . . "yet you did
not return to me, says the Lord." In verse 10 he says God sent
pestilence and sword . . . "yet you did not return to me, says the
Lord." In verse 11 he says that God overthrew some of them like
Sodom and plucked them like a brand from the fire . . . "yet you
did not return to me, says the Lord."

What was God doing here? He was blocking Israel again and again
in search for happiness without the true God. Hosea (whose ministry
may have overlapped with Amos') described it like this. God says to
his wayward wife Israel,

I will hedge up her way with thorns; and I will build a wall
against her, so that she cannot find her paths. She shall pursue
her lovers, but not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but
shall not find them. Then she shall say, "I will go and return to
my first husband, for it was better with me then than now." (Hosea
2:6–7)

That's what God was doing with Israel. Five times he blocked
her. Again and again he cut her off on her downward path to
destruction. He shouted in her ear that there is no hope while
running from God.

The Final Word: One Last Hope

And now Amos was giving the last word. Verse 12: "Therefore [that is, since you have refused to return to God through all that
has happened to you]—therefore, thus I will do to you, O
Israel; because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, O
Israel!"

The judgment of God is coming in a decisive way and there is no
averting it. But there seems to be one last hope. Prepare! Get
ready! Prepare to meet your God. If you would not prepare to meet
him in holiness and truth at Bethel, then at least prepare now for
this final meeting in judgment. For after this there will be no
more chance to prepare.

So draw from Amos' prophecy this morning this truth: When we
come to meet God (whether in worship at Bethlehem, or in judgment
at the last day), we should prepare.

Four Ways to Prepare to Meet God

So let me summarize four ways I see in this text that we are to
prepare to meet God, and then close with some very practical
suggestions for preparing for worship at here at Bethlehem.

1. Go to a Church Where Truth Is Honored

First, you should prepare to meet God in worship by going to
a church where truth is honored as a very high premium.

The Israelites were a religious people. They came to Bethel and
came gladly. But they had lost touch with the God of truth and they
were not worshiping in truth. There were some left over forms like
tithing and thank-offerings and sacrifices. But the very center and
heart of worship was missing—the true God.

If I were looking for a place to worship God today in America,
my top priority would be, where is a people and leadership that
loves God's truth, and that means loves the Bible—manifestly
loves the Bible, evident in the way it is woven through the life of
the church. I would look for a church that loves clear,
straightforward, biblically based doctrines about God and his work,
and about his will for all of life.

The first preparation for worship is to find a
body of believers
where truth about God is top priority.

2. Renounce All Known Sin in Our Lives

The second preparation for worship is that we renounce all
known sin in our lives before coming to worship God.

The wealthy people of Israel tried to make love with their true
husband while keeping a mistress on the side. They tried to worship
God while concealing sin in their lives. They oppressed the poor,
and crushed the needy, while living in wealth and luxury.

Worship will inevitably become a weak, empty form and ritual if
we try to keep on with it while our hearts are running after other
gods. God will gladly take the dirtiest sinner into his arms on
Sunday morning who comes with a broken and contrite heart intent on
forsaking all known sin and trusting in Jesus for cleansing. But
God will not be mocked by those who make like they love him and
willfully break his law during the week. So the second act of
preparation is to confess and renounce all known sin and come to
worship cleansed by the blood of Jesus and resting in his
forgiveness and hope.

3. Take Note of What God Is Doing in Our Lives

The third preparation for worship is that we take note of how God has been trying to get our attention.

Five times in Amos 4 God says that he had done specific things
in the lives of his people to turn them back to himself. And five
times it says, "Yet you did not return to me." Each of these things
God had done to get their attention could be explained as natural
events with no divine cause. But God holds Israel accountable to
listen and respond. That's the meaning of "Yet you did not return
to me."

In not hearing the voice of God, or seeing the hand of God,
Israel failed to prepare to meet him. That is what we must not do.
We must wake up and stop looking at our lives like secular,
scientific, western naturalists. God is doing things in your life
which are gracious providential messages to return to him and trust
him. That is the third way we prepare to meet him in worship. Take
note of what he has been saying to us in our lives to draw us to
himself.

4. Draw Near to God in Our Hearts

Finally, we prepare for worship by drawing near to God in our
hearts.

When God said five times, "You did not return to me," he did not
mean that they should have come more often to the place of worship.
The returning was not a physical movement. Returning to God was a
movement of the heart, not a movement of the body. There is a heart
preparation to be done in order to meet God.

Jesus said, "This people honors me with their lips, but their
heart is far from me" (Matthew 15:8). When this is the case, the
preparation needed is a movement of the heart from far to near, and
yet it is a movement that is not measured in inches or miles.

It is measured with the tape of attention—you may not
even be thinking of God Saturday night or Sunday morning. So your
heart is far from him measured by attention.

Or it may be measured by the tape of focus—you may have
some attention on God but it is broken up by other things and there
is no focused attention that gets God clearly in view and makes
him the primary object of attention.

It is measured by the tape of desire—you may feel
little desire for God but be very much caught up in a greater
desire for sports or finances or a trip to the lake, while the
desire and the longing for God is weak by comparison.

Or it can be measured by the tape of trust and
hope—your trust in God may be weak and your hope faint and
wavering.

Or it may be measured by the tape of delight or joy in
God—you may feel much more pleasure Saturday night in a late
movie than in meeting God in the morning.

Every one of us is far from where we want to be on one of these
measuring tapes every week. So I want to close with some practical
suggestions that I think will help us prepare to meet God in
worship together Sunday morning.

Learning to Go Hard After God in Worship

My assumption is that our primary goal is to meet God in this
service on Sunday morning, and to commune with him and to hear him
and to speak to him and to savor him. My further assumption is that
this is very hard to do and that it takes teaching and
preparation of heart. My third assumption is that most of us grew
up in churches where this was not a conscious priority—a
sustained, God-centered focus on dealing with God without human
distraction.

Let me illustrate. I was at a gathering recently where we were
worshiping. The pianist was very accomplished. It was obvious. But
he had led us into the presence of the Lord and most of us really
were singing to the Lord and dealing with God. Another act of
worship was to follow this song that would have kept us in
conscious communion with God. But as the hymn came to an end, the
person who was to lead us into the next act of worship looked at
the pianist and said, "There is living proof that all men are not
created equal." A few people chuckled. And then he tried to
reintroduce communion with God.

That sort of thing is what I grew up on. And many of you did.
And it's why we never learned what it is to go hard after God in
worship. It's why a sustained communion with God in corporate
worship is a foreign experience for most people. And yet when most
Christians taste it, they sense that they have come into something
that they have missed and that is needed in the core of their
lives.

We have eleven years of experience in the old sanctuary and
hundreds of testimonies from people whose lives have been changed
by meeting God in the sustained, earnest, undistracted worship of
this service. We are not perfect in our leadership. But we know
that we have something of extraordinary preciousness to preserve in
this new sanctuary.

Practical Suggestions

So I close with these suggestions for how we might prepare to
meet our God in this service:

1. Begin Orienting Your Heart on Saturday Night

Set aside some time Saturday night to begin the orientation
onto worship. Turn off the television and set your mind on things
that above with the word of God and a time of prayer.

2. Go to Bed Early

Go to bed early enough so that you are fresh and emotionally
alive Sunday morning. The price of late night movies or parties on
Saturday will be powerless worship Sunday morning.

3. Get Up Early Enough on Sunday

Get up in time Sunday so that you do not have to rush to get
to church, but have a little time to be alone with God and ask his
blessing on you and your family and on the church. I can almost
promise you that your depth of communion with God in the
service will be directly proportionate to the way you have sought
the Lord for his blessing Saturday night and Sunday morning. This
will take some discipline and some planning. But you will probably
never turn back once you taste the fruit.

4. Begin Seeking God as Soon as You Enter

When you come into the sanctuary, begin to seek the Lord. That
means that by and large there will be a holy hush across the
sanctuary. But it will be a very different kind of stillness than
the awkward silence before a Sunday School class where you want
everyone to mill around and talk and nobody is. There is a world of
difference. And the difference will be made and felt by whether
hundreds of you are really going hard after God, or just politely
waiting for the show to begin. You will make the difference in
those minutes as to whether a visitor senses cool distance or the
reality of God. The very point of those moments of going hard after God is that this room will be filled with the power of God. The
goal of those moments is not that people will be impressed with
us—either our piety or our friendliness—but that they
will fall on their face and say, "God is in this place." And that
will only happen if people are taken up with God.

If you want your friendship to go deep with someone, I invite
you to make an experiment. As you enter the sanctuary talking, and
the prelude begins, try saying this: "Let's finish this discussion
after the service. I think John needs our prayers. Let's do battle
for him." My wager is; that camaraderie in the warfare of prayer
will take your friendship deeper than another five minutes of
conversation.

5. If You're Late . . .

If you have to come late—and we all do from time to
time—minister to those who have to sit in the commons and
minister to those worshiping in the sanctuary with a spirit of
worship and prayer. I visited Crystal Free last summer and lost my
way so that I was late. I waited probably seven or eight minutes with a
group of people. But I was with them in a very special way, because
of the window and because of the stillness outside the door.
Waiting in this spirit is a powerful yes to the undistracted
dealing with God going on inside.

6. Become the Actor in Worship

Finally, before every act of worship, whether a hymn or a
reading or a prayer or an anthem or a moment of silence or a
sermon, say to Lord, "Lord, I come. I come to sing to you. I come
to pray to you. I come to listen to your Word. I come to enjoy your
presence." Don't drift through the service as though the action is
on the platform. Become the actor. The greatest action in worship
is when a heart that is far from the Lord draws near to the Lord,
and focuses on him and desires him and trusts him and enjoys
him.

I believe God has great things for us this year in worship.
Things we have yet to experience from his power. The forms and
patterns are not cast in stone. No one but God can predict what
worship at Bethlehem will look like in the years to come. But my
prayer and my goal is that it will always involve sustained,
earnest dealing with God himself.

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books.

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